Confusion in the Service of Clarity: The Circus in Patrick Modiano's Un Cirque Passe.

COMMENTING on Patrick Modiano's 1992 Un cirque passe, Alan Morris includes the novel's title among the mysteries and unanswered questions generated by both the style and the plot of this roman policier that is not really one. As he states, "[T]he title promises us a circus, of which no mention is made for ages" (188). The unfulfilled, or at least deferred realization of our expectation of a circus is only one example of how this text simultaneously posits a relationship to the circus, and establishes a distance from it. We find this ambiguity already present in the very wording of the title. The circus of Un cirque passe is in motion and in transit; it is at once present and absent; it is passing by, parading in front of us, and it would be impossible to say whether it is arriving or leaving. In the title, the circus is, but it is not here, or at least not entirely. Within the text, the word cirque first appears as part of an expression uttered by a female friend of the narrator's surrogate father Grabley. Sylvette, who has just performed a strip-tease in a Pigalle nightclub, and who is feeling ashamed and humiliated by what she has been forced to do to make a living, directs her anger toward Grabley who invited the narrator Jean and this latter's new girlfriend Gisele to see the show: "Quand meme," the narrator's report of her speech begins, "elle n'etait pas encore tout a fait devenue une bete de cirque ou un animal que l'on va voir au zoo le dimanche" (114). Sylvette's situation and her statement relate circus with performance, spectacle, and objectification, three phenomena from which, as her statement indicates, she, in her embarrassment, would want to dissociate herself. The scene ends with Sylvette walking on to yet another performance, Grabley expressing surprise and dismay at her moodiness, and the two young people barely suppressing a fit of laughter. It appears that Sylvette, however much she might wish otherwise, is part of the circus.